Nearly every tech company in the Seattle area is hiring developers — and struggling to find them. Finding female developers is even harder, but a year-old Seattle training program is seeking to fix that.

Ada Developers Academy, a program of the nonprofit Technology Alliance, is taking a new approach to the familiar “coding bootcamps.” Rather than hold a two-month intensive, the program is a year-long approach to teach an all-female class how to code and how to work on a developer team.

The program is named after Ada Lovelace, a British mathematician from the mid-1800s who is largely recognized as the first computer programmer.

The Ada program is free for students; local tech companies pay $25,000 to sponsor a student through six months of classroom training, then the student works for the company as an intern for six months. Students are given an average of $1,000 each month for living expenses.

The program is making it possible for women to have the opportunity to change their careers and enter the highly lucrative tech field — all while providing more trained workers to the region’s talent-starved tech companies. More women in technical and leadership positions will create a snowball effect. The women will serve as role models for girls and women as they choose career paths.

"We're creating a different kind of pathway for highly capable women to move into tech," Technology Alliance Executive Director Susannah Malarkey said. "It's changing the way people think about how to actually move into software development."

Ada, which is getting ready to graduate its first cohort in October, teaches 15 women Ruby, Rails, HTML, Javascript and other languages.

Before they joined Ada, many of the women were underemployed, Malarkey said. Now, the majority are on track to be hired by their sponsoring companies when the program ends in mid-October.

Sue White had a degree in biochemistry when she moved to the West Coast to pursue computer science. She's an intern at Zillow and said the program has prepared her to work full-time as a developer.

Women are severely underrepresented in the lucrative technical fields — they comprise only about 15 percent of Washington state’s programmers, according to the Technology Alliance.

The women-only program serves several purposes, Malarkey said. It provides an opportunity for a group that likely wouldn’t otherwise have it to learn to code. It also gives the students a support network.

Women leave tech companies in higher rates than men, Malarkey said, often because it’s hard to be the only woman on huge, all-male developer teams.

The Ada women act as a support network to debrief and give advice to each other.

"It's been really great for support throughout the internship process," student Ellen Wondra-Lindley, 24, said.

Liz Pearce, CEO of Liquid Planner, said the company’s Ada intern, Audrey Carlsen, came to the job very prepared.

Liquid Planner has five female programmers of 13 total, a much higher number than many other tech companies. When it first hired a female dev, she started helping with recruiting and it snowballed. It’s helpful to see someone that looks like you doing the job you’re interviewing for, Pearce said.

“When you walk into our developer wing you see women writing code and you feel you have a place there,” Pearce, who is a member of the Ada steering committee, said.

Having women on the team also brings different viewpoints and experiences to the table, she said.

The program announced earlier this month its second cohort of 24 students, chosen from more than 200 applicants. They will start training this fall.